Sunday, August 30, 2015

I think we all remember flinching with horror as pudgy "soccer mom" Katie Castro got starched by a professionally trained fighter at Xplode Fight Series.
XFS owner Gregg Sharp publicly defended
the spectacle as the video quickly went viral, saying the video was
actually shot six months earlier and that "if we were not in San Diego,
no one would care."
Well, somebody seems to care now. According to an in-depth story by MMAfighting.com, the video has sparked an investigation by the California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) into unsanctioned events like XFS.
CSAC
is considering sanctions against fighters who compete in these
unregulated, Native American reservation shows, and will also look into
whether some promoters like Sharp are committing criminal acts.

Although Native American reservations are beyond the jurisdiction of
the CSAC, it can pull the license of fighters who participate in such
events.
Jessica Penne, a UFC women's strawweight top contender,
attended the January 2015 event to support a competing friend and was
shocked at what she witnessed.

"We've come a long
way from barnyard fights and all these crazy backyard fights. Our sport
is so much better than that. We are athletes and I think we should hold
ourselves to another standard. By supporting that kind of show, I think
it holds us back. We deserve to fight in better organizations than that,
in better venues than that, get paid better than that. People that
continue to fight in these organizations, it's just devaluing us."

However,
Sharp remains defiant that despite the fact Castro looked ill-prepared
for the fight she's a "street fighter" and "far from a soccer mom." He
contends that use of the term "soccer mom," which began with the
website BJPenn.com, has been the main reason for the controversy.

"The
quality of the fight turned out to be poor and unfortunately we're in
the position we're in now. If that fight ended in a rear-naked choke in
42 seconds, this wouldn't be the same case."

Part
two of a three-part investigation into this story from MMA reporter
Marc Raimondi continues this weekend at MMAfighting.com.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

The
physical damage to Dominica is worse than first thought and the
emotional toll from Tropical Storm Erika, which killed at least 20
people on the tiny Caribbean island, is substantial, the nation's Prime
Minister said Friday night.

"Rest
assured, my brothers and sisters, you are not alone in your period of
mourning in your period of pain, in your period of suffering and
anxiety," Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit told the nation. "We are in
this together and help is coming your way."

The
storm has passed and was assaulting the Dominican Republic and Haiti on
Friday night. It left behind swamped villages, eroded away roads and
washed-away homes.

Some people were still missing, Skerrit said.

The
Prime Minister, who was in Saint Lucia when the storm first hit,
deflected criticism that the government didn't issue proper warnings to
its 70,000 citizens.

"There is no need
to indulge in blaming others for what has happened in Dominica," he
told the nation. He said forecasters had been focused on the larger
islands in the Caribbean and Florida.

"I've
experienced at least six to seven hurricanes. I'm not even counting the
storms. I'm not even counting the depressions," Scotland said.

The state of Florida has declared a state of emergency as of Friday
morning, in anticipation of the arrival of Tropical Storm Erika and its
potentially hazardous impacts.
A tropical storm landfall or close
encounter now appears very likely for south Florida and much of the
state may well be affected by the storm’s rainfall.
In the Miami area, tropical storm force winds could begin by early Sunday afternoon and last through late Monday morning.
Even
though it’s a long shot that Erika becomes a hurricane prior to
landfall, a tropical storm is quite capable of causing flash floods and
power outages, as well as coastal erosion and flooding, and the winds
can throw around unsecured loose objects.
Tropical storm warnings
cover Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and much of the
Bahamas. A tropical storm watch is in effect for the western Bahamas
and south Florida should be added later today.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Two Canadian law firms have filed a $578 million
class-action lawsuit against the companies that run Ashley Madison after
a hacker group's data breach exposed some 39 million memberships in the
adultery website earlier this week.
Charney Lawyers and Sutts,
Strosberg LLP, both of Ontario, said Friday that they filed the lawsuit
on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to Ashley Madison and whose
personal information was disclosed to the public. The website, with its
slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," is marketed to facilitate
extramarital relationships.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the
Ontario Superior Court of Justice, targets Avid Dating Life Inc. and
Avid Life Media Inc., the Toronto-based companies that run
AshleyMadison.com. Its class-action status "still needs to be certified
by the court," the statement says.
Ashley Madison did not
immediately respond to requests for comment. It has said that the
personal details exposed in the initial data leak can't be used to prove
the infidelity of their clients.
The plaintiff is Eliot Shore, an
Ottawa widower. Shore said he joined the website for a short time in
search of companionship after he lost his wife to breast cancer. He said
he never cheated and never met up with any members of the site.
Lawyer Ted Charney told The Associated Press it is the first class-action suit filed against the companies in Canada.
In
the U.S., Missouri lawyers have filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S.
District Court seeking more than $5 million in damages. Lawyers filed a
statement of claim late last month on behalf of an unnamed female
plaintiff who said she ponied up $19 so Ashley Madison would purge her
personal information from its website in a process called a
"paid-delete."
The lawsuit argues that the privacy of Canadian
members was breached in July when hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison's
website and downloaded private information. The data breach includes
users' personal names, emails, home addresses and message history. On
Tuesday, the information was posted publicly online.
The law
firms' statement said numerous former users of the website have
approached them to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian
law.
"They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect
its users' information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee
for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that
the information was left intact and exposed," lawyer Ted Charney said.
"The
sensitivity of the information is so extreme and the repercussions of
this breach are so extreme, it puts the damages faced by members in a
completely different category of class-action suits," said Charney.
The
law firms said the lawsuit is not being brought against the hackers,
who have said they attacked the website in an effort to close it down as
punishment for collecting a fee without actually deleting users' data.
The
law firms did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and it
was not clear in what court the class-action lawsuit was filed.
There
are hundreds of email addresses in the data release that appear to be
connected to federal, provincial and municipal workers across Canada, as
well as to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the military.
According
to the data breach, some of the website's customers made credit-card
transactions from computers attached to the Department of National
Defense and Canada's House of Commons.
The data, stored in more than 2,500 files, involved transactions spanning from March 2008 to several days in June of this year.
National Defense referred most questions to the federal Treasury Board, which has an overall responsibility.
Lisa
Murphy, spokeswoman for the Treasury Board, would only say that the
government has rules for the professional and personal use of its
computers.
In a written statement, a DND spokeswoman echoed some
of Murphy's statement, and said the department "has policies and
practices in place to deter, detect and enforce unauthorized and
prohibited computer use."
The credit-card information of U.S.
government workers, some with sensitive jobs in the White House,
Congress and the Justice Department, was also revealed in the data
breach.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Los Angeles police search home of Gene Simmons, but he's not suspect

Los Angeles police say a task force
investigating Internet crimes against children served a search warrant
at the home of Kiss rocker Gene Simmons, but neither Simmons nor anyone
in his family is suspected in the case.

Lt. John Jenal says the warrant was served Thursday at the Simmons home in Benedict Canyon near Beverly Hills.

Jenal says the detectives involved want to emphasize that Simmons and
his family were "extremely cooperative" and none of them are suspected
of a crime.

Police would give no further comment on the investigation.

A representative for the Simmons family released an official statement to FOX411 on the home search.

“Members of the Los Angeles Police Department visited Mr. And Mrs.
Simmons at their home to discuss a crime that may have occurred on their
property last year while Mr. Simmons was away on tour with KISS,” it
read. “Neither Mr. Simmons nor any member of his family is a person of
interest in the investigation and they are cooperating fully with the
investigation. At this time, the police have requested that Mr. Simmons
and his family not discuss the investigation publicly so as not to
compromise it."

Simmons’s wife Shannon Lee Tweed, 58, took to
Twitter to respond to the situation tweeting, “Thank you for your
support. We couldn’t be more horrified that someone used our residence
for such heinous crimes. Law enforcement is on it.”

The movement to appoint former boxing champion Holly Holm as Ronda
Rousey’s next opponent began in conference-room talks, Ultimate Fighting
Championship President Dana White told the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

Immediately
following Rousey’s 34-second knockout victory over Bethe Correia in
Brazil on Aug. 1, both White and Rousey spoke as if it was a foregone
conclusion that top-ranked contender Miesha Tate would get a third crack
at Rousey (12-0) for the UFC women’s bantamweight title.
Tate in
July impressed with a stand-up victory over a respected striker, Jessica
Eye, and Tate also stands as the only fighter who’s taken Venice’s
Rousey past the first round.
Yet, when it came time to formally discuss plans of who’d be assigned to
take on the imposing challenge of fighting Rousey Jan. 2 at the MGM
Grand in Las Vegas, the focus switched from Tate to an alternate type of
challenge.

“We were talking about Miesha from the start, then as we started
sitting around we were saying, ‘Everyone has seen the Miesha fight
already,’ ” White said, referring to Rousey’s third-round armbar
submission victory over Tate on Dec. 28, 2013, and her first-round
armbar submission of Tate in the Strikeforce organization in March 2012.
“A
third fight in a rivalry usually comes after the stuff we’d see in
[Arturo] Gatti-[Micky] Ward,” White said of the classic boxing trilogy.
“With Miesha, the result has been the same twice. Everyone’s already
seen that fight.”
White said he’ll work to stage a fight between
top-ranked Tate (17-5) and fourth-ranked Amanda Nunes (11-4) on the
Rousey-Holm card.
“Theres two sides to the coin … I’m not sure
losing another fight to Ronda so soon would be good for Miesha,” White
said. “She’s not going anywhere. I think she’ll be fine.”

Former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck was sentenced Friday
to 48 weekends in jail after pleading guilty earlier this summer to a
child sex abuse charge.

Shattuck, 47, pleaded guilty to fourth-degree rape in June, admitting
that she performed a sex act on a 15-year-old boy at a beach house in
Delaware last Labor Day.
In a Delaware courtroom on Friday, Shattuck tearfully expressed remorse and apologized to the boy and his family.
"Mrs.
Shattuck is extremely sorry for any pain and all pain she may have
caused. She is determined to demonstrate, at this point, to all involved
her sorrow, her remorse and full acceptance of responsibility for any
poor decisions she made," defense attorney Michelle Lipkowitz said.
Shattuck
pleaded for forgiveness, telling the judge: "I take full responsibility
for what I did. I never intended to hurt anybody. I will spend the rest
of my life making this right."
Shattuck addressed the allegation
that she met the boy last year through text messages sent by her own
son, saying, "I never should have responded and had conversations with
someone else's son."
Shattuck's lawyer blamed her involvement with the boy, in part, on being emotionally distraught by the breakup of her marriage.
"Her husband left her without a whole lot of notice for a younger woman. It was abrupt," the attorney said in court.
Shattuck's
Baltimore lawyer called Friday afternoon to say Shattuck wanted to
clarify what her other lawyer said in court about her marital breakup,
saying: "It is categorically untrue that my ex-husband or anyone else is
to blame. No one else is to blame. I take full responsibility for my
actions."
Prosecutors had asked for 22 months of jail for
Shattuck, while defense attorneys sought no jail time in the case. The
victim's parents asked the judge for incarceration, saying the impact on
their son has been "devastating" and calling Shattuck a rapist.
"Ms. Shattuck is a criminal. She stole his innocence. He is changed," the boy's mother said in court.
Shattuck's
full sentence was the maximum of 15 years in prison with all suspended
but 48 weekends in jail. But that time hangs over her head and would
come into play if she violates probation.
Shattuck must also pay the boy's family $10,000 and register as a sex offender for the next 20 years.
"He
is punishing her, but the 48 weekends, he called it the (Violation of
Probation) Center, it's basically jail, while at the same time, not
punishing (Shattuck's) children and giving them the opportunity to be
with her most of the time," defense attorney Eugene Maurer said.
Shattuck
will serve her sentence over two years. She cried throughout the
sentencing hearing, which was attended by her family. Before the
hearing, Shattuck could be seen praying.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

22 Year Old Girl named Kim spends $90,000 meant for her Senior Year, and
instead, took a trip to Europe and bought a lot of clothes. She then
proceeds to blame her parents for not teaching her how to budget
correctly.